The HAPS Annual Conference is less than a week away. I told my students the other day that for an A&P professor, this is Woodstock. They didn’t quite understand, but I’m sure you all do! This is the one event of the year where we can share our unbridled enthusiasm about the human body with people who feel the same, and don’t mind if you talk dissection over dinner.

The Communications Committee is always seeking ways to connect members and non-members with HAPS. As a fun way to keep us connected during the conference days, the ComCom has a special activity to share! Look out for this notebook circulating on the conference floor:

Watch for this notebook in Ohio- add your thoughts and doodles, then get a chance to WIN IT on Monday afternoon!

Think of this as the ComCom version of “hot potato.” I will start passing this notebook around during the social on Saturday evening. Here are the rules:

Keep the notebook for no longer than one hour (if you have it in your possession after 10pm, keep it safe until the following morning).

Using one or two pages, do one of the following:

Share a story about how HAPS changed your life in some way

Share a best or worst moment in teaching

Share a teaching tip; this could be your best advice, or something specific, like a drawing

Include your name, and where you are from. If you would agree to have your contribution shared in the conference wrap up publication, please put an asterisk after your name. I will take some photos of the submissions with asterisks and share those in a conference wrap-up blog post!

If you get the notebook and don’t want to participate, please randomly pass it along. But please pass it to someone you don’t know! We want to connect new HAPSters!

On Monday afternoon, whoever has the notebook at 4pm should return it to me, where the door prize drawings will be taking place. If those directions change due to conference timing or needs, I’ll indicate that in the front of the notebook. One lucky HAPSter will be randomly selected from the door prize pool to go home with this fun collection of HAPS memories/tips/stories!

I can’t wait to see what we come up with, and what we have to share! See you all in May!

This year the HAPS board has focused on clarifying our financial instruments and has completed a top-to-bottom review of our policies, procedures, and bylaws. This sort of work is detail oriented and can drag on, but is necessary for organizational efficiency. Some of the things that the board found during this process were surprising and some were reassuring. All of the findings reaffirmed the fact that HAPS is in a strong financial position and is focused on ways to help members far into the future.

The proposed set of revisions to the bylaws will increase financial transparency, clear up some confusion about past donations, and improve financial management. We’ll vote on these revisions at the Annual Conference in Columbus Ohio on May 29th, during the general membership meeting.

So what was reassuring about our finances? HAPS has grown its donated funds from essentially zero in 2009 (when fundraising began) to nearly $120,000 today. All these donated funds, and the interest generated from them, have been left untouched since at least 2013 to facilitate growth (HAPS has been funding scholarships out of the operating budget since 2013). Now that we have a sizable nest egg, the next step is to create a management and spending plan that is both sustainable and prudent. Through the proposed bylaws revisions, the HAPS board has created a new committee to do just that – the HAPS Finances Committee will provide guidance to the board on the management of both donations and general savings.

So what was surprising? Despite talk of a foundation for years, it turns out that no foundation was ever formally created – and apparently, that is a good thing! A foundation is an body that is formed around some problem or idea. A foundation is not specific to a single organization. For example, one might form a foundation to cure cancer and then give the foundation’s money to anyone working to cure cancer (not just to one institution). Obviously, HAPS donors never intended to give money to HAPS only to have HAPS give that money to a separate foundation. The HAPS “foundation” was just a misunderstanding of the terms being used, but the idea of supporting HAPS via donations is alive and well.

So what is changing in the bylaws? There are three main changes.

First, we will be following the suggestions of our attorneys and removing article 17 from the bylaws. This is the article that specifies a foundation and a bunch of other overly complex financial structures that HAPS does not need.

Second, we will be establishing a restricted endowment to properly channel some past donations.

And third, we will establish the aforementioned Finances Committee to advise the board on proper management of all HAPS funds.

If you’d like to brush up on some of those terms, check out the glossary in the “lots more info” tab in the 2018 conference app.

None of this is as exciting as HAPS Synapse! or any of the Update Speakers or workshops or posters, but governance has its place at an annual meeting. Hopefully we’ll see you there!

Many of us in HAPS have been fortunate to have learned human anatomy either by dissecting human specimens or by working with already dissected bodies. Many of us now teach students using human cadavers as the primary specimens for study in the lab. Beyond that, the anatomical knowledge of the general population results from investigations performed on dissected humans in the past. How many of us have ever considered where the dissected bodies came from? Probably very few; many of us can take for granted the present level of anatomical knowledge. Where these long-gone anatomists obtained their specimens never enters our conscious thought.

Early Asian anatomical art

There is a rich history of human dissection dating back to before the start of the Christian era. There are references to human dissection, cadaver investigation, or funerary practices in Egypt, Persia, Babylonia and India that extend back in time over four thousand years. Even then a pattern emerges indicating that those with the least and those guilty of crimes bore the burden of serving as specimens for dissection. There was even a brief period shortly before the Christian era during which human vivisection was practiced on criminals in Egypt.

Over the span of time, bodies have come from multiple sources including debtors, societal outcasts, the mentally ill and strangers, recent unclaimed dead, anatomical oddities and even victims murdered specifically to serve as dissection specimens. Bodies obtained by “entrepreneur” grave robbers throughout the Renaissance and continuing well into the nineteenth century in Europe and America were the primary supply of bodies for dissection, with bodies stolen from the easily accessed burial sites used by families with few or no real financial assets, and rarely if ever from the much more secure cemeteries of the rich and privileged.

Death mask cast of William Burke and a pocket book made from his skin; Burke was executed in 1828 for murdering people and delivering their bodies to medical school in Edinburgh.

During the nineteenth century in Europe, donation of bodies by family members became legal as a way for the poor to eliminate funeral expenses. In Tasmania, genocide of the aboriginal population in less than a century largely benefited bone collectors back in England. In America, a booming business in the bodies of African slaves and freeborn blacks signaled another low point in this narrative.

Finally, the successful heart transplant performed in 1967 by Dr. Christian Barnard in South Africa triggered an increased interest in organ transplantation and the importance of organ and body donations. The result was the passage of the first Uniform Anatomic Gift Act in 1968, creating a sustainable system based largely on altruism to provide for both the needs of the transplant community and those of anatomy and medical education.

Hopefully this narrative that chronicles the thoughtless and often diabolical events of the past will spur those of us involved in anatomy and medical education to consider and appreciate the unwilling sacrifices of so many in the past that made the current state of anatomic knowledge possible. As educators, we should play a role in acknowledging, even briefly, this history to our students and the debt of gratitude we owe to so many who have been so wronged in the past.

Bill Perrotti is a HAPS President Emeritus and a professor at Pennsylvania State University.

Eduard Pernkopf was a Nazi. That is the short of it. He also created an anatomical atlas that has become a notorious source of ethical debate since at least the 1990s.

So, who was Eduard Pernkopf?

Pernkopf was an Austrian medical doctor. During World War 1, he served as a military physician for Austria. After the war, he returned to the University of Vienna and became an Anatomy Instructor for the medical school. By 1928 he was a full professor and by 1933 he was the director of the anatomical institute. Also in 1933, Pernkopf pledged his allegiance to the Nazi party, later becoming a member of the Sturmabteilung, Hitler’s pre-war Stormtroopers.

In 1933, he also started work on his anatomical atlases. Four artists rendered watercolor portraits of his dissections, Pernkopf set out to create the most realistic representations of cadaveric dissections ever available with the caveat that the color be as realistic as possible. Two volumes ended up being published, one in 1937 and one in 1941. By 1941, all four of the artists joined active military or paramilitary service for Germany.

So, why is this atlas so controversial?

In 1938, Pernkopf became Dean of the medical college at the University of Vienna. He immediately expelled all non-Aryan professors; at Vienna, that meant over 75% of the faculty, several of whom would end up dying in concentration camps across occupied German territory. As Dean, Pernkopf enacted a strict racial hygiene approach to medicine. Across occupied Germany, medical schools were teaching that there were inferior anatomical characteristics of non-Aryans like Jews, Gypsies, Romani, and Poles, and homosexuals.

As a footnote to history, no one was forcing these scientists to go along with ideas like racial hygiene. In fact, it seems like the scientists were the driving force behind these ideas. Spurred on by eugenicists in the U.S., Nazi scientists were pushing hard for eugenics in Germany. This lead to forced sterilization, anti-miscegenation and anti-immigrant laws, and euthanasia. These were the three basic prongs of the Nazi Volksgesundheit, or Public Health. By 1934, forced sterilization turned to euthanasia of people deemed mentally feeble. Early euthanasia programs turned to Holocaust as Germans placed non-Aryans in concentration, work, and prison camps.

As you can imagine, a lot of dead bodies meant a steady supply of cadavers for teaching and research at the 31 German or German occupied medical schools in Europe. There is evidence that while Pernkopf was dean, the University of Vienna medical school accepted 1,377 executed prisoners. It was customary that the medical schools would have embalming centers at the execution sites so that cadaveric materials could stay as fresh as possible.

There is questionable imagery within the atlases; images of emaciated cadavers in poor condition. There is also Nazi imagery in the signatures of the artists.

So, we have a bunch of Nazis who were very racist and who used very questionable sources for dissection to make their controversial anatomical atlas.

But, Vienna was bombed by allied forces in 1945. The university sustained heavy damage and the records containing the information about where the bodies used for the atlas came from were destroyed.

Did he use executed prisoners or not? And what should we do about the book?

Come find out and discuss the answers to these questions at the workshop Pernkopf, NAZIs, and MVCC at the 2018 HAPS Conference in Columbus.

This post was written by Aaron Fried, Assistant Professor of Anatomy and Physiology at Mohawk Valley Community College. Thanks to my colleagues and willing editors: Shannon Crocker, Eileen Bush, Don Kelly, Bill Perrotti, Emeritis, and the late Sam Drogo.

Being the Executive Director of HAPS is a great job, in part because I never really know what opportunities are going to present themselves on any given day. Two weeks ago I got a call from friend and HAPS McGraw-Hill Education exhibitor Jim Connely. Jim has boundless energy and enthusiasm, so when he calls, you know something cool is going to happen.

And it did!

This particular call was a proposal from Jim to feature HAPS in his Succeed in A&P podcast. By last week, we had recorded a conversational interview about HAPS and the upcoming Annual Conference in Columbus (May 26-30). And today that conversation is available to everyone as a podcast (just two weeks from initial phone call to release!). If you would like to hear more, or if you know of colleagues who might like to hear more about HAPS, this podcast conversation is a great starting point.

For those new to podcasts, they are very similar in concept to an audio book. The main difference is that a podcast tends to narrowly focus on a topic and to me, podcasts seem like the radio stories or interviews that you might hear on public radio. Most people I know download their podcasts to their smart phones so that they can listen to them whenever they have a moment – in line, in the car, whenever. But you can use whatever digital device you prefer – tablet, computer, whatever works for you.

Most digital devices these days come with a program that will allow you to download and listen to podcasts. If yours did not, then finding an appropriate player is as simple as searching your favorite app store. Once you’ve got that figured out, all you need to do is follow the links below and you’re in business.

HAPS is fortunate to have the support of a whole host of wonderful companies that are all working to make A&P education more effective. Jim is a great example of the personal effort and earnest desire to help that so many of our exhibitors share. Listen to the podcast and you will see what I mean.

Some of our most popular blog posts describe teachingtips developed by HAPS members. We choose a handful of these to publish on the blog, but there are hundreds of tips that have been collected over the years. These little snippets are being linked to the HAPS A&P learning outcomes and posted to the HAPS website, for members only. Sojoin HAPS now, and get access to many more teaching tips like this one.

Enjoy this teaching tip from HAPS Past President, Terry Thompson.

Objectives:

Engage students with a kinesthetic demonstration of the action potential “wave” with ions moving in or out of membrane channels

Motivate critical thinking by having students analyze and evaluate various components of the activity as a model of the physiological events

Materials:

Color-coded cards: multiple cards with Na+/K+ on opposite sides; one card with ACh/Ca2+ on opposite sides; one card with neuron cell body/synaptic end bulb on opposite sides. Can use cardstock or plastic protective sleeves. Use large font to fill single page.

Procedure:

Line students up facing class (or each other if using two lines). Explain that students will represent the axolemma: phosphate “head”, lipid “legs”, voltage-gated channels “arms”.

Give each student a Na+/K+ card and review relative concentration of each ion extracellular and intracellular. Designate: above “heads” as extracellular and floor as intracellular; right hand as voltage-gated Na+ channel and left hand as voltage-gated K+ channel. Start with Na+ card held toward observers, above their heads, in right hand.

Demonstrate the depolarization/repolarization cycle by bringing Na+ card down in front of body, flipping K+ side toward observers as pass to left hand, then move above head. Have all the students practice this synchronously until they feel comfortable, saying “depolarize” and “repolarize” out loud to help. Discuss the electrogenic activity of the Na+/K+-ATPase pump as it relates to this kinesthetic demonstration.

Review continuous conduction and challenge them to now complete the same movements but this time in sequence, like the “wave” in a stadium. Show the “neuron cell body” and “ACh” cards and discuss what initiates the impulse. Can elaborate on difference between ligand-gated and voltage-gated channels; graded potential, threshold, and action potential; neurotransmitter for motor neuron or other neurons; dendrites, soma and axon hillock; etc. Students will often come up with ideas of ways you could include other elements in the demonstration, or at least evaluate and understand what this particular activity as a model is NOT showing.

“Start” the first person in line by saying “threshold”, and allow the “wave” to progress down the axon. This usually elicits lots of laughing and suggestions from the audience. Allow them to repeat until they produce a reasonable “wave”, starting each with a threshold stimulus.

Finally as a reasonable “wave” is progressing down the line, run to the other end and flip your cards to show synaptic end bulb and hold the Ca2+ card above your head. When the wave reaches you, bring the Ca2+ down and flip to ACh, passing it above your head for release of neurotransmitter at synapse with muscle or another neuron. Discuss this added activity to the model as a way to summarize the activity.

Extensions can include discussing what parts of this demonstration could be improved on or don’t accurately reflect the physiology. Can also discuss what would need to be changed to demonstrate saltatory conduction instead of continuous conduction.

NOTE: This activity was also presented by Terry Thompson at 2016 HAPS Atlanta Conference as part of the group workshop entitled “Add Drama to Your Classroom – Great Kinesthetic Activities for Students.”

Looking to meet other A&P instructors and exchange ideas regarding A&P teaching?! Want to learn more about A&P educational products and technology?! And want to have some fun?! Look no further!!! The 2018 HAPS Annual Meeting is being held in Columbus, Ohio from May 26 through May 30.

The first two full conference days at the Greater Columbus Convention Center will include update speakers from a number of organizations including the American Association of Anatomists (AAA), American Physiological Society (APS), American Society for Microbiology (ASM), and The Ohio State University College of Medicine (OSU-COM). There will also be other activities at this location, including presentations of scientific posters, tables of interesting things from exhibitors, and lively social events. Additionally, during these first two days, we will highlight graduate student research with elevator talks by a number of graduate students, as well as conduct a Women in A&P Panel Discussion. As your conference planners, we’ve put together an engaging and stimulating first two days!

The last two days of the conference will be held at OSU-College of Medicine and will include workshops presented by your fellow HAPSters — with some of these workshops even being held in the cadaver lab.

There are also two post-conference events scheduled for Thursday May 31, including a hands on head and neck anatomy prosection course. And of course, no visit to Columbus is complete without a visit to the Columbus Zoo & Aquarium. Visit the zoo with HAPS on May 31, and you’ll be privy to some special talks! (It pays to be a HAPSter!)

Conference registration and additional information can be found on the HAPS website!